Improvements in Virtual Sensors: Using Spatial Information to Estimate Remote Sensing Spectra

• Main Authors: Oza, Nikunj C., Srivastava, Ashok N., Stroeve, Julienne
• Other Authors: NATIONAL AERONAUTICS AND SPACE ADMINISTRATION MOFFETT FIELD CA AMES RESEARCH CENTER
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Published: 2005
• Subjects: Information Science; Atomic and Molecular Physics and Spectroscopy; Miscellaneous Detection and Detectors; *DATA PROCESSING; *SPATIAL DISTRIBUTION; *REMOTE DETECTION; *SPECTRA; ALGORITHMS; SYMPOSIA; RADIOMETERS; *VIRTUAL SENSORS; DATA MINING; AVHRR(ADVANCED VERY HIGH RESOLUTION RADIOMETER); MODIS(MODERATE RESOLUTION IMAGING SPECTRORADIOMETER); COMPONENT REPORTS; National Snow and Ice Data Center
• Online Access: http://www.dtic.mil/docs/citations/ADA449864; http://oai.dtic.mil/oai/oai?&verb=getRecord&metadataPrefix=html&identifier=ADA449864

Various instruments are used to create images of the Earth and other objects in the universe in a diverse set of wavelength bands with the aim of understanding natural phenomena. Sometimes these instruments are built in a phased approach, with additional measurement capabilities added in later phases. In other cases, technology may mature to the point that the instrument offers new measurement capabilities that were not planned in the original design of the instrument. In still other cases, high resolution spectral measurements may be too costly to perform on a large sample and therefore lower resolution spectral instruments are used to take the majority of measurements. Many applied science questions that are relevant to the earth science remote sensing community require analysis of enormous amounts of data that were generated by instruments with disparate measurement capabilities. In past work, we addressed this problem using Virtual Sensors: a method that uses models trained on spectrally rich (high spectral resolution) data to fill in unmeasured spectral channels in spectrally poor (low spectral resolution) data. We demonstrated this method by using models trained on the high spectral resolution Terra MODIS instrument to estimate what the equivalent of the MODIS 1.6 micron channel would be for the NOAA AVHRR/2 instrument. The scientific motivation for the simulation of the 1.6 micron channel is to improve the ability of the AVHRR/2 sensor to detect clouds over snow and ice. This work contains preliminary experiments demonstrating that the use of spatial information can improve our ability to estimate these spectra. See also ADM001850. Presented at the IEEE International Geoscience and Remote Sensing Symposium (IGARSS 2005) (25th), held in Seoul, Korea, on 25-29 Jul 2005. Published in the Proceedings of the IEEE International Geoscience and Remote Sensing Symposium (IGARSS 2005) (25th), 2005. Prepared in cooperation with the National Snow and Ice Data Center.